The all-too common question around this time of the year "Is there a war on Christmas?" can be answered in the affirmative if the information in "Bowing to Beijing" (Regnery Publishing, 256 pages, notes, appendixes, index, $27.95) is correct -- as I think it is.

The war is not coming from U.S. companies that play down Christmas by saying "Happy Holidays." The war on Christmas -- and China's estimated 130 million Christians -- is being waged by the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China (PRC), despite the fact that 80 percent of Christmas toys come from the sweatshops of China, according to authors Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II. The nation's Muslims, predominantly ethnic Uighurs from the far western provinces, are even worse off, which hasn't appeared to bother China's Muslim WMD clients like Syria and Iran. And even the country's fiercest defenders cannot defend the continued attack on Tibet and the Han-ification of the country. (The predominant ethnic group of this gigantic country of 1.3 billion is Han).

From the New York Times, Sept. 15, 2011:

BEIJING — Four men accused by the government of being behind the bloodshed this summer that claimed dozens of lives in the far western region of Xinjiang have been sentenced to death, the state news media reported on Thursday. Two other men were given 19-year prison terms.

Scores of people were detained after a series of violent outbursts in Kashgar and Hotan, two Silk Road outposts whose large Uighur populations have chafed under Chinese rule for years.

The condemned men — Abdugheni Yusup, Ablikim Hasan, Muhtar Hasan and Memetniyaz Tursun — are all Uighurs. They were convicted of homicide, leading a terror group, manufacturing illegal explosives, arson and “other crimes.” A report in the state-run Xinjiang Legal Daily said the trials, which took place on Tuesday in Kashgar and Hotan, were “open and fully protected the suspects’ legal rights.”

Uighur exile groups, however, said that the defendants were tortured into giving confessions and were denied adequate legal representation. “This was not a fair legal process by any means,” said Dolkun Isa, secretary general of the World Uyghur Congress, an advocacy group that is based in Germany. “These sentences are political decisions, not legal ones.”

* * * The portrait of China painted by Decker and Triplett depicts a country that not only is not moderating as it becomes more capitalist -- it is widely predicted to outrank us as the world's largest economy by 2016 -- but one that continues to violate the everyday human rights of its citizens even more than before. Christians are under constant attack and the PRC "ramped up persecution of the country's Catholics during Lent 2011. Every holiday season Beijing and local cadres bulldoze churches and round up Christians to remind them that there are severe consequences to faith in the officially atheist People's Republic," the authors write.

Decker and Triplett cut through the fog of soothing, pro-China propaganda -- facilitated by hefty fees paid to American public relations firms and prestigious law firms like Patton Boggs and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld -- to reveal the disturbing truth: far from the gradually reforming “partner” portrayed by its many American apologists, China is an aggressive and rapidly militarizing criminal state feverishly striving to displace America as the world’s preeminent power.

While the Obama administration is mired in big-government “solutions” to “threats” such as global warming, unregulated businesses, and free-market healthcare, Obama administration officials have ignored and compounded the single biggest danger facing the United States: the rising power of communist China.

Decker and Triplett write that the facts reveal that Chinese leaders show their hostile intentions in every realm, from industrial espionage to the political kind, often using non-ethnic Chinese spies, the Obama administration refuses to take action or even acknowledge the threat—and as new evidence indicates, has gone so far as to actively cover up China’s misdeeds.

Pro-PRC minions like Louisiana native Tommy Boggs of Patton Boggs -- his sister is Cokie Roberts of left-leaning National Public Radio -- and Texas native Robert S. Strauss (a former chairman of the Democratic Party and former ambassador to the USSR and the Russian Federation) and founding partner of Akin Gump are now almost exclusively in the ranks of the Democratic Party, in contrast to the past when Republicans carried water for the PRC, the authors write. After all, it was GOP President Richard M. Nixon who initiated diplomatic relations with the PRC, aided by Henry Kissinger, who is benefitting financially for his public relations efforts whitewashing Red China's well-know abuses.

Co-author Triplett exposed the murderous nature of a visitor to Washington, described in Chapter 8, the president of the PRC, Hu Jintao, in an op-ed piece for The Washington Times (link: www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/14/who-is-hu-jintao/). Kissinger worked to clean up the image of Hu, but the facts as revealed by Triplett showed him to be the brutal, Tibet-hating "Top Cop" of the PRC.Here are the first few paragraphs of Triplett's Jan. 14, 2011 Op-Ed, "Who is Hu Jintao? Official niceties obscure his bloody record": ”It is not every day that the queen and the British prime minister welcome a state leader who ordered his troops to mow down unarmed civilians.” So begins a British newspaper report by eminent China scholar and editor Jonathan Mirsky on the visit of Hu Jintao to England in 2001. At the time, Mr. Hu was only No. 2 in China.

Mr. Mirsky wondered what briefing notes the United Kingdom's Foreign Office sent around, because Mr. Hu’s official biography as released by the Chinese Communist Party is pretty innocuous. He graduated from China’s version of MIT, and he was the youngest provincial Communist Party secretary of his time.

But it is Mr. Hu’s role as Communist Party secretary in Tibet (distinctly not addressed in his official biography) that has led to the red stain he will never wash off. In early March 1989, a small group of Tibetan monks led a march in Lhasa to protest killings by Chinese troops the year before. They were fired upon. Tibetan citizens responded with demonstrations. Mr. Hu declared martial law in Lhasa and “Chinese security officers, under orders from Party Secretary Hu, opened fire for three days, killing somewhere between 100 and 700 Tibetans,” Mr. Mirsky wrote.

Mr. Hu’s motivation for ordering the killing of unarmed civilians is unknown. What is known is that Mr. Hu has a very strong racial hatred and fear of Tibetans. We know this because Mr. Hu confessed such to Mr. Mirsky in an interview before the Lhasa murders. He loathed Tibet’s climate and Tibetans’ “lack of culture.” He kept his family in Beijing and visited Lhasa as infrequently as he could. Perhaps he might have appreciated Tibetan culture more if the Chinese communists had not destroyed so much of it, beginning with their invasion of the country in 1949. By 1989, perhaps 90 percent of it was gone, along with more than a million Tibetans, murdered in their own land. As a symbol of their suffering and of the nation (and a pointed rebuke to Mr. Hu and his Communist Party comrades) the Nobel Committee awarded the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize to His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama.

For this week’s state visit to Washington, Mr. Hu is No. 1, called “president” of the People's Republic of China although he never stood for election by the people. His real power is his position as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and his role as the chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission.

Read the entire op-ed and wonder why the U.S. would invite such a man to a state dinner, where President Barack Obama honored him and Vice President Joe Biden, a supporter of Taiwan and strong anti-Communist -- according to the authors -- squirmed and avoided photo ops.

In their fact-packed book, Decker and Triplett reveal:

* How China’s accumulating wealth is solidifying the Communist Party’s grip on power, funding a major military build-up, and making the regime more bellicose.

* How Obama’s reckless government spending and utopian green policies are empowering China at our expense. * China’s role as a major global proliferator of weapons of mass destruction to rogue regimes and Islamic terrorist groups.

* China’s recurring pattern of stealing U.S. military, trade, and company secrets, including test answers to college entrance exams from the Educational Testing Service to get more Chinese students into U.S. universities.

* Beijing’s vast program to buy influence in American politics and universities, through a little known effort called Confucius Institutes on college and even high school campuses.

With China threatening everything from our national security to our food supply, "Bowing to Beijing" explains how the Chinese regime is conspiring against America — and how our own leaders remain willfully blind to the danger.

Here are some relevant excerpts from the book: On an aggressive PRC:

In November 1997, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism that “we’re facing the possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor. … There is going to be an electronic attack on this country some time in the future.” Two years later, he told a secret session of the House Armed Services Committee, “We are at war - right now. We are in cyberwar.” Fast-forward more than a decade, to 2011. President Obama’s choice for secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, tells the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing that the United States faces a possible “electronic Pearl Harbor.” Mr. Panetta had been the CIA director for the previous two years - so he would have known.

Two extreme, nearly identical warnings 12 years apart should have brought home the magnitude of the electronic threat facing the country. Yet nothing was done. When former Director of National IntelligenceAdm. Mike McConnell was asked directly by Congress about our ability to withstand such an onslaught, he replied, “The United States is not prepared for such an attack.”

The Obama administration has shown a shocking disinterest in this threat, earning it a blunt rebuke from former White House national security official Richard Clarke. While “our government is engaged in defending only its own networks … it is failing in its responsibility to protect the rest of America from Chinese cyber-attack,” Mr. Clarke wrote in the Wall Street Journal. In other words, the federal government has taken action to protect itself, but not the rest of us. Mr. Clarke further declared that “senior U.S. officials know well that the government of China is systematically attacking the computer networks of the U.S. government and American corporations,” and yet, “In private, U.S. officials admit that the government has no strategy to stop the Chinese cyber-assault.”

This searing denunciation of the Obama administration’s passivity toward China is made all the more powerful by the fact that Mr. Clarke is no Republican partisan. To the contrary, he had a bitter falling out with the Bush administration during his service, after which he became a generous contributor to liberal groups such as Moveon.org and to Democratic candidates including Barack Obama himself.

The Obama administration at least claims to recognize the problem. Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn told a European audience in June 2011, “The third and most dangerous cyberthreat is destruction, where cybertools are used to cause physical damage. … It is possible to imagine attacks on military networks or on critical infrastructure - like the transportation system and energy sector - that cause economic damage, physical destruction, or even loss of life.” However, the administration’s grand solution is, as Mr. Lynn took great pride in announcing, merely to institute “a pilot program with a handful of defense companies to provide more robust protection for their networks.” The commanders of the Chinese Army must be quaking in their desk chairs.

Most Americans don’t realize the Chinese have already successfully attacked many U.S. government and civilian computer systems. The Wall Street Journal noted that in one major Chinese intrusion, the attackers were “able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems … potentially making it easier to defend against [American F-35 fighter-jets].” Consequently, “Chinese spies enjoyed months of access to the personal Google emails of U.S. officials and human rights activists,” reported London’s Telegraph in 2011.

In 2006, network intrusions caused authorities to shut down the entire computer system at the U.S. Naval War College. Air Force Gen. Richard Goetze, a professor at the military school who previously was the commander in charge of developing America’s strategic nuclear war plan, told his students the Chinese “took down” the war college’s network. Even the school’s website and email systems went down. For weeks afterward, military officers - both students and professors - at the school were forced to use private email accounts such as yahoo and gmail instead of their official addresses, exposing government business to untold security risks. This embarrassing attack exposed a serious Pentagon vulnerability as the Naval War College was where the Defense Department created a cyberwarfare center specifically to counter the threat from hackers. Two days after the incident, U.S. Strategic Command raised the security alert level of America’s entire military computer network. Alan Paller, a security expert at the SAND Institute, observed, “The depth of the penetration is more than anybody is admitting.”On cyber offensives:

America isn’t the only target; financial institutions and international organizations are also vulnerable to Beijing’s cyber-offensive. Chinese hackers blew through the defenses of the Indian company Satyam that held the computer services contract for the World Bank in 2008. Internal World Bank emails called this an “unprecedented crisis,” as World Bank officials held angry closed door meetings with China’s executive director with the bank. Similarly, the International Monetary Fund won’t say who penetrated its information systems in the spring of 2011, but most experts point to China. In 2009, a Canadian think tank identified China as the source of a cybernetwork that “tapped into classified documents from government and private organizations of 103 countries.”

CNN’s computer expert Adam Segal notes that Chinese hackers stole proprietary information from “DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, RSA, Epsilon, NASDAQ and at least a dozen other firms.” Moreover, a 2011 Chinese cyber-assault on major Western oil companies, nicknamed “Night Dragon,” was discovered by cybersecurity firm McAffee, Inc., which also found that a “one-state actor” had successfully penetrated scores of industrial companies in what McAffee dubbed “Operation Shady Rat.” The firm didn’t specify which nation was behind Shady Rat, but a major clue is found in the operation’s targeting of the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and various national Olympic committees, all this occurring just before and just after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Finally, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was produced, was victimized by Chinese hackers in the fall of 2007 as a follow-on to a larger penetration of U.S. national security just months before.

The Chinese hackers appear to be a vast army of chair-borne warriors associated with or downright part of the People’s Liberation Army. According to a secret U.S. State Department cable revealed by WikiLeaks, American specialists have tracked some of the most serious attacks back to sites known to belong to electronic espionage units of the Chinese military. In 2007, angry U.S. defense officers leaked an internal review reporting that the Chinese military had attacked Pentagon computer networks, including the one serving Defense Secretary Robert Gates.* * * And to think I'm writing this review on a computer, one of my three Apple Macintoshes, "designed in California, assembled in China!" The Horror, the Horror! But what's the alternative, I ask? There isn't a single electronic device manufactured in the hollowed out U.S. of A. anymore.

About the Authors

Brett M. Decker is the Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Times. A former Governor of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, he has been an editor and writer for The Wall Street Journal, a reporter and television producer for Robert Novak, and speechwriter to Majority Whip Tom DeLay in the U.S. House of Representatives. Decker has served as Senior Vice President for the Export-Import Bank and Pentagon Federal Credit Union. A native of Michigan, he is a graduate of Albion College, the U.S. Naval War College and Johns Hopkins University, where he is an adjunct professor of government.

William C. Triplett II is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller "Year of the Rat, Red Dragon Rising", and "Rogue State". He is the former Chief Republican Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his articles on China have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Washington Times.